"The BRICS Are in a Class by Themselves. "Yes and no. There is no question that the BRICS -- Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the group's newest member, South Africa -- are big. They matter. In terms of population, landmass, and economic size, their pure dimensions are impressive and clearly stand out from those of other countries. Together, theymake up 40 percent of the world's population, 25 percent of the world's landmass, and about 20 percent of global GDP. They already control some 43 percent of global foreign exchange reserves, and their share keeps rising.

Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs put the spotlight on the rise of the original four of these big new economic powers when he gave them the name BRICs in 2001, and their collective growth began to soar. But in reality their economic success had been a long time coming. Twenty years before that, when I was at the World Bank's International Finance Corp. (IFC), we were identifying the opportunity to rebrand these countries, which, despite their enormous economic potential, were still lumped together with the world's perennial basket cases as "underdeveloped countries" stuck in the "Third World."